The blessed night at last arrives, and so do you, and you’re immediately made to feel you should kneel in gratitude and supplication. Just inside the restaurant’s door, displayed like a religious icon, is the chef’s book, bearing the chef’s visage. It lets you know you’re in the presence of holiness. It lets you know you can spend another $34.95 on your way out.

You spend plenty before then. Servers muscle you toward a 47-course tasting menu, replete with shochu and grappa pairings, telling you it’s the only way to appreciate fully what “Chef” (no pesky, plebeian “the” needed) can do.

It’s crucial that you appreciate fully, so each dish comes with a disquisition on its origin and proper consumption.

Chef got the eggs from an old lady with cataracts upstate. Chef foraged for the mushrooms in a thicket near the Tappan Zee. Chef counsels a bite from the ramekin on the left, then a sip from the shot glass on the right, then a palate-clearing curtsy.

I exaggerate, of course, but only about the details. Not about the climate around too many upscale restaurants these days. Not about an unmistakable, unsettling shift in the balance of power between self-regarding restaurants and self-effacing diners.

Once they were lucky to have us. Now we’re lucky to have them. They don’t meet us on our terms. We meet them on theirs.

Gordon Ramsay swaggered into town late last year and, instead of unfurling a welcome mat, laid down a gauntlet. Callers were told that the tables they reserved in his shimmering dining room at the London NYC hotel were good for only two hours, after which diners would be shooed to a peripheral lounge for any coffee or after-dinner drinks they might desire.

When this proviso was reported, Mr. Ramsay backtracked, saying that reservation agents had misspoken or misunderstood, and that the time limit applied only to tables in the London Bar, a more casual area just outside the inner sanctum.

But he made no apologies for setting up a ticking clock there, even though diners in the London Bar are on the hook for as much as $85 each in food alone if they listen to servers’ ordering advice.

Thomas Keller just changed the rules of engagement at Per Se. When the restaurant opened in 2004, diners didn’t have to sign on for the nine-course, $150 tasting menu it showcased most prominently. They could elect a less time-consuming menu of five courses for $125. They could eat at Per Se without surrendering three hours or more.

As of this month, though, the nine-course menu is the shortest, and it now costs $250. That price includes a 20 percent tip and free bottled water, coffee and tea, while the old price didn’t.

Mr. Keller said by phone recently that a vast majority of visitors to his restaurant ordered the nine courses anyway, so a simpler, speedier route seemed unnecessary.

But he also made clear that nine courses were what he deemed best for diners visiting Per Se or its sister restaurant in the Napa Valley, the French Laundry.

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SHOW THE MONEY BLT Prime is one of Laurent Tourondel's three restaurants.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

“I’d like them to experience the entire experience, the entire Thomas Keller, the entire French Laundry,” he said. People who stop at five courses, he said, are doing the equivalent of leaving a Broadway play at intermission or walking through only half of a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Has the exhibit given them the full impact of what it was supposed to by whoever designed the exhibit?” he asked. “Probably not.”

Chefs at the pinnacle of their profession have long considered themselves artists, with ample reason. But it’s no longer just the top chefs — it’s no longer just chefs, period — who hoist themselves onto pedestals, inviting reverence.

At Porter House New York, a lesser restaurant that, like Per Se, is on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center, a line on the menu tells you that autographed copies of a cookbook by the executive chef, Michael Lomonaco, are “available for purchase.” Never mind a doggie bag. Take home some instructive reading material.

After the restaurateur Danny Meyer’s “Setting the Table” was published last fall, he propped up copies right inside the front doors of Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park and Tabla, where the book was also displayed above the bar, just to be safe.

Mr. Meyer isn’t a chef. He’s essentially a host, renowned for his humility and hospitality, for rounding out your meal with a prettily wrapped coffeecake for breakfast the next morning.

And yet he set things up so that when you walked into one of his restaurants, your first encounter wasn’t necessarily with a host or a hostess saying hello or taking your coat. It was with a photograph of him on a self-flattering book (“America’s most innovative restaurateur,” trumpets the cover) about how he always puts you, the customer, first.

THE lucrative publishing contracts that restaurateurs and chefs receive, the cable television shows on which they appear — all of this has encouraged a showboating that travels into restaurants, where the open kitchens sometimes seem less like peepholes for us than pulpits for them.

When the chef Laurent Tourondel opted for an open kitchen in the main, third-floor dining area of BLT Fish, he had to sacrifice a restroom. Diners must go to the first floor to find one. But look at what Mr. Tourondel got: a broad, beautifully framed stage for his ministrations — provided, of course, that he’s not at BLT Steak, BLT Prime, BLT Burger or BLT Market (coming soon).

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The chef Gray Kunz can indeed be found regularly at Café Gray, where he strides through a seemingly blocklong open kitchen positioned between the main dining room and a wall of windows onto Columbus Circle. He and the kitchen staff get the city views; diners get a view of him and the kitchen staff.

It’s partly our fault. It’s largely our doing. Chefs and restaurants wouldn’t behave the way they do if we penalized them for it, instead of readily demonstrating our fealty. We take the 9:45 p.m. reservations (no exaggeration there). We agree to call a second time to confirm.

We buy the books and watch the television programs, granting our culinary heroes the celebrity that they then lord over us. Those of us who love restaurants — of course including critics, of course including me — talk and write about chefs the way movie lovers wrote and talked about directors in the 1970s, ascribing outsize authority to them, treating them as mystically endowed auteurs rather than what they really are: key — but by no means solitary — figures in an ultimately collaborative process.

And they gladly play the parts of creative demigods, roles they’ve helped fashion for themselves.

I visit L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, in the Four Seasons Hotel, during its first week. The restaurant is supposed to start serving lunch at 11:30 a.m., but by 11:40 it hasn’t opened, and by noon only 8 of the 20 or so people angling for a seat have been escorted inside. Most of the others stare poignantly at the hostess. And wait. And don’t complain.

After my friends and I get a table and place our order, one of our servers volunteers, in a jubilant voice, that Mr. Robuchon thinks we’ve made excellent decisions. I survey the path between my table and the door. Is it long and broad enough for cartwheels?

I visit the restaurant Ureña, owned by the chef Alex Ureña, whom our server ceaselessly invokes. “Chef has sent out these amuse-bouches,” the server says toward the start of dinner. “Chef was so pleased you liked your desserts,” he says toward the end. Chef is apparently above such things as names. And we’re apparently expected to know who he is — and to be primed for his genius — before we sit down.

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Books displayed at Tabla.Credit
Lars Klove for The New York Times

Of course L’Atelier and Ureña have tasting menus. It won’t be long before Hooters has a tasting menu. Tasting menus are all the rage, reflecting more than the desire of many diners to sample little bits of lots of things.

In places where these menus are pushed aggressively — Gordon Ramsay labels his own six-course option the Prestige menu — they also represent ways to transfer control from diners to restaurants.

“I personally love to have tasting menus,” Floyd Cardoz, the executive chef at Tabla, said in a telephone interview last month. He was referring to the five- and seven-course menus he puts together there, and his word choice made me wonder.

Are such menus about coddling diners or flattering chefs? Are a diner’s whims being trumped by a chef’s wisdom?

And are the wine pairings really necessary? Some restaurants insist so, effectively shaming diners into submission and creating an evening of relentless verbiage, the soliloquies by the sommelier filling any gaps in the soliloquies by the servers.

Not that there are many gaps. Even in restaurants well below the top end, servers describe dish after dish, from an amuse-bouche hardly bigger than a semicolon to a scoop of vanilla ice cream, in exhaustive detail and priestly voices. They interrupt diners if they have to. They press on even if the gazes at the table are averted, the jaws clenched. The ceremony and the sweetbreads must come first.

The restaurant must have its say and way. At several casual restaurants over the past year — restaurants, mind you, that seem to exist in part for snacking and for cobbled-together meals — companions and I were told that we couldn’t order a few appetizers to sate our hunger while we sipped drinks and perused menus. We had to place our entire dinner order at once.

The reason, surely, had to do with the understandable challenges of a small kitchen’s trying to pace a large number of orders during a busy dinner service. But it was stated in terms of how the chef preferred to operate, as if that should be our concern, or about our own best interests, as if the restaurant were the final authority on those.

At Freemans, a self-consciously scruffy redoubt on the Lower East Side, the server who denied us our cheese toasts and hot artichoke dip explained, “You’ll have a more pleasant experience that way.” Such altruism. Moved us to tears.

AND now, confessions: I gave moderately or hugely positive reviews to Ureña, BLT Fish, L’Atelier, Eleven Madison Park and Per Se, all of which had virtues that, to varying degrees, outweigh their vanities. Besides, those vanities are too pervasive to hang on any one restaurant, or to hang any one restaurant with.

I raved about Babbo, where the seductiveness of the food transcends a bullying rock soundtrack that puts the cult of its chef before the comfort of diners. When you’re at Babbo, you listen to what Mario Batali wants you to, at the volume he elects, no matter how unlikely you are to enjoy it. It’s his house, not yours.

That’s the subtle or unsubtle message at too many restaurants. And while it hasn’t killed the joy of eating out, it has at times certainly sullied that pleasure.

The inconveniences mount, the orgy of enforced adulation intensifies, and bit by bit, dining in New York’s most prized restaurants becomes cause for exhaustion instead of elation, an act of obeisance rather than indulgence. Something’s got to give.

At Del Posto, Mr. Batali’s newest Manhattan restaurant, he and one of his business partners, the restaurateur Joseph Bastianich, send you out the door with crumbs. Literally. Instead of a Meyer-style coffeecake, the parting gift is a bag of bread crumbs.

It may not be suitable for breakfast. It may not be glamorous. But for Mr. Batali, it’s an opportunity for synergy. The bag includes instructions for using bread crumbs, sourced to Page 39 of “Molto Italiano,” one of Molto Mario’s cookbooks.

It’s a gesture that’s as much a come-on as a thank-you, pointing you toward another way to show Mr. Batali some lucre and love. Reminding you of his glory. Affirming your good fortune in being privy and witness to it.